I am only resolved to act in that manner, which will, in my own opinion, constitute my happiness, without reference to you, or to any person so wholly unconnected with me.

Jane Austen, “Pride and Prejudice”

Many changes to this blog as of late. I broke overlong posts into two by creating sixteen new chapters, and posted all the poems I’d written but forgotten to upload; redesigned the layout; added quality of life features (e.g. table of contents); changed chapter titles and featured photos; and improved the visible readability. Posts went from a dense scroll of words to space-out text and photos that are easy to navigate. 

Still on the to-do list: add photos; write synopses; and rewrite all the pre-Taiwan chapters. They are messy, rife with errors, and lack censured information.

After all this, I will finally curate an abridged version for a memoir.

They say that documentaries are born in the editing room. The director never knows what the story is about until shooting ends and sifting through the heaps of rushes begins. That’s exactly the process I found myself in: over 150 posts, or 1,200 pages, of stories I need to re-read. Only now, after the trip is over, I know what the story I will extract from this will be about. 

In part 2, I…

• Graduate from the elementary school of love
• Lose the ability to cry
• Condemn the unyielding conflicts that mar interpersonal relationships and bring endless wars
• Decide I no longer wish to love
• Lament growing apart from my family
• Fall out of love
• Appreciate my belonging to a minority
• Return to having my recurring middle school nightmare, and middle school problems

14 May 2024

The Middle School of Love

A few days ago, a guy I’d gone out with sent me a message. We hadn’t talked in months, since the night I’d ruined our date.

People I’d assumed I would never hear from again were always the ones who popped up after months of silence.

Why did he ask about me? I wondered. And why didn’t those who had promised to do the same?

I felt like a speck on dust on the scroll of love. I always thought that I was strong. But people left me because they saw that I was weak.

Today, it occurred to me that I’d been using plurals a lot these days. I had feelings for several people.

All my life, I was aromantic. Dating in Israel had never reddened my emotions. Now, I began to understand polyamory. Yet I failed to even reach monogamy.

How had I gone from being incapable of love to loving more than one person?

I also began to relate to Shakespeare’s sonnets, and his reason for writing no less than 154 love poems. I’d been writing one every week. Ever since memorizing sonnet eighteen in high school, I could recite it word for word; but now, as I wrote about undying love and eternal words, I felt its meaning to my core.

I understood Romeo and Juliet, who I’d always mocked. Every time I had fallen in love, it was at first sight. The last time was so intense, that maybe three days and nights together would have also turned it into a matter of life and death.

Who knew. I would live for love, but would I die for it?

It didn’t even make me cry anymore.

Failed love had driven me crazy with inspiration. It had sucked my ink and fed me lines; produced manuscripts that even a thousand years couldn’t erode. But it no longer brought tears to my face.

The last time depression had dried my eyelids, I was fourteen. Living in Israel with my family, feeling lonely and misunderstood, I’d fled reality to the world of fiction. Thoughts about writing had replaced feelings.

What had changed since the journals I’d written as an outcast adolescent?

Maybe life was a series of schools. Someone new to love would graduate from elementary school, only to fall into the social alienation of middle school.

And all the angst that teenagers mixed into the batter.

I had a lot of anger these days. At the aftermath of my trip, and the reality in Israel.

I was angry at people who had broken their word and vanished into thin air. Friends who’d promised to update me upon arriving at a destination I’d helped arrange. Acquaintances who’d promised to help me after I’d saved them. Dates who’d already spoken about next time before I could even express the same intent.

It was perfectly valid for someone to reject my presence. But why express the opposite in the first place? And then ignore my messages. I’d never said anything I hadn’t meant.

In June 2023, while volunteering at a party hostel in Busan, another volunteer had given me one of the most valuable pieces of advice about dating: “If someone wants you but you don’t want them, don’t tell them you’ll meet again just to avoid hurting their feelings. This will only aggravate their damage.”

Shamefully, I was guilty of this behaviour. But I’d met anyone I’d promised to, and given them a second chance.

I was angry at all the people in Israel. Despite having no shortage of wars and enemies, this country was likely to collapse due to inner strife – a war with itself. Religious extremists, both Muslim and Jewish, received exorbitant stipends out of taxpayers’ pockets, meant to encourage their religious lifestyle. They multiplied so much, each family birthing an average of ten kids, that they would triple their population in the next few decades. Who would pay for them then?

The liberal elite of doctors, lawyers, and engineers – who earned the highest salaries in Israel – would stop paying the living expenses of almost half of the population. They would sober up and fathom how much a religious state was exploiting them. It took only twenty thousand of these workers to emigrate for the Israeli economy to collapse.

Israel wouldn’t get to celebrate one hundred. Ironically enough, annual wars with Hamas or relentless nuclear threats from Iran would have nothing to do with it. The only haven in the world for Jews didn’t care about the Jews who kept it secure. And after the bloodiest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, it wasn’t even a safe space for them to shelter.

If Israel didn’t outgrow its religious extremity, escalating wars and a deteriorating economy would turn it into Ukraine, which was responsible for Europe’s largest refugee crisis since World War 2.

Yet I was angry at the entire world for demanding a ceasefire. Hamas had been starting wars with Israel almost every year since its formation in 2007, even though each of them had ended in a ceasefire. The current war was the worst Israel had endured in fifty years, after the worst terrorist attack of this century. Why was the world condemning Israel more than Hamas?

Israel was neither a victim, nor a saint. It took two intransigents for a 2,000-year-old conflict. Was there a bloodier and longer conflict in history?

I was angry at the deaths of innocent Palestinians. But I didn’t care about the deaths of terrorists. Israel didn’t start wars, it only retaliated, and it had every right to defend itself. It was the Israeli Defence Forces’ methods that were wrong.

I didn’t want a ceasefire. A ceasefire was just a band-aid. I wanted an end to all wars. Hamas had pretended to negotiate for peace, lied about prioritizing the economical rehabilitation of Gaza over future warfare, received jobs, funding, and relief from Israel, and used this aid to commit a massacre. Partygoers at a music festival in the desert had been shot, raped, kidnapped, and mutilated while dancing during a major holiday.

Hamas ought to be annihilated in response to that. All the innocent Palestinians that Hamas had been oppressing in Gaza – why didn’t Egypt, an enormous country with over a hundred million residents, save them? Where were Lebanon, Syria, and Iran when it came to Palestinian victims? No one helped them, but the world only denounced Israel.

Most of all, I was angry that a group of eighteen- and nineteen-year-old girls serving in the Israeli Defence Forces as lookouts in the border with Gaza had alerted about Hamas’s preparations for the war months in advance.

“There’s going to be a war bigger than ever in October,” they’d confided in their families. But their officers had dismissed their warnings as figments of imagination.

October had come. Hamas had beleaguered the lookout base, and the girls had continued to alert the army of this infiltration, even as terrorists had been approaching their control room. The Israeli officers hadn’t deigned to send the girls any help. So the terrorists had shut down the base’s electricity, kidnapped and impregnated some girls, and burned the rest to death.

I was angry at people who never apologized for their mistakes, let alone admitted them. Whether leaders in the Israeli government and military, or family and friends. If one side refused to acknowledge any wrongdoing and hurt, how could a conflict not extend over thousands of years?

People asked for niceties, and then played fake. They saw me as a gentle boy who couldn’t handle the truth. But I’d grown up with wars and ghosts in the land of the undead. I’d graduated from the toughest creative writing program in the UK. They wouldn’t last one lesson in the school of phantoms. I could handle rejection better than ghostings.

And to think that I had worked as a ghostwriter before my trip. This irony was too romantic to detest.

After a month in Israel, it was evident that humans would never change. The problems in my family had persisted, the problems in Israel had aggravated, and the expectations I’d fostered of people had burst in my face. I could write 154 sonnets, or meet a new love interest – and it would come down to absolutely the same thing. A thing that instilled in me hatred.

This was what my year of discovering love had amounted to. My dating life seemed less like a string of memories, and more like scenes out of a novel. Love had teleported me to another dimension, and sucked all the oxygen.

I was suffocating in a paradise I’d never imagined to find myself in, longing to descend back to hell.

During my travels in Taiwan, I’d reached many conclusions about love. Over the past month, I’d learned a new lesson: love was stronger than will.

I no longer wished to love.

19 May 2024

Familial Love Replaces Romantic Love

A few days ago, I’d received my Certificate of Eligibility from the Immigration Office in Japan. In a month and a half, I would start studying in Tokyo.

I could not stop smiling.

Today, however, I grew sad.

All my life, I’d been counting the years until I left Israel. Now that it was happening – not for a Master’s Degree in England, or a trip in the Far East – I felt that it was coming too soon. I didn’t want to say goodbye to this country.

I wondered why.

But I did know that I would miss some of my family, some of the time. For the first time in my life, I understood why my mom stuck like glue to her twin sister, despite their decades-long clash. Their relationship was so close and warm, that they met every few days, and fought every few days. Passion intensified both their delights and arguments.

I had already forgotten about my time in Asia and my joy there. I had forgotten about the people I’d met, and what it was like to travel.

It had always been absurdly easy for me to move from one routine to another. I could travel to countries I knew nothing about for months, and find my footing there in mere days. After living alone in the UK during COVID, I had learned that I could also take care of myself.

By now, I’d adjusted back to Israel. To the culture, the people, the food, and my loveless day-to-day. Who was that guy who had partied and dated every night in Taipei?

Perhaps this change of heart was simply a force of habit. But it did lead to another realization: I barely thought about ghosts now.

Falling out of love felt strangely lightweight.

24 May 2024

Relapse

After taking a Japanese exam and booking my flight to Tokyo, I’d been searching around the clock for an apartment. I was thinking about my future as a Jewish-Israeli expat in Tokyo who spoke Hebrew, English, and Japanese, when it hit me. How many people would I find that resembled me?

For the first time in my life, I felt proud to be a minority. Not because I belonged to Judaism, which I still rejected. Because it made me special. Both my parents were Jewish, and on one side, my roots in Israel went back at least seven generations. The vast majority of Jews couldn’t proclaim that.

While Jews all over the world were growing scared of admitting their Jewish heritage – antisemitic attacks had become a regular occurrence in the US, Canada, Europe, South America, Africa, and Australia – I felt confident that the Far East would never discriminate against me for this religion. Moreover, I still felt more comfortable around Asians.

At night, however, I had a relapse. I didn’t cry – but I found myself chewing the same longing again, yearning to reconnect with people from my trip.

I felt myself falling out of love. But I also knew that disillusionment was a wave that flowed and ebbed. Distance was paramount here, because if I undid all the milage I’d swum, I’d sink again to the deep end.

The rationalist in me wanted to learn how to fall in love without letting it haunt me. The romantic in me eschewed all love that did not consume me. My Myer-Briggs personality type had always straddled the line between T and F.

26 May 2024

Missiles and Nightmares

Today at 14:00, an alarm sounded. Hamas had fired missiles at central Israel.

My mom and I dashed to our safe room, barricaded the door and window, and turned on the television. Explosions of intercepted missiles were booming outside our building despite the air-tight barricades. A few people in my city got injured from debris, because the alarm had caught them on the street.

It was the first time since my return to Israel, and the first in four months in my city. Only in the south (near Gaza) and in the north (near Lebanon) were missiles a daily threat.

In the evening, another big fight with my mom over the same old issues made me reconsider my premature sadness. She hadn’t changed after all. With my flight to Tokyo booked, I started counting the days until I left Israel again, and lived as far away as possible from my family.

At night, I dreamed that supernatural monsters were trying to kill me. This ongoing nightmare had begun when I was fourteen.

Today I had a really bad nightmare. All my nightmares in the last few months featured a “supernatural entity” (like the one with the Pokémon) trying to break in and kill me.

Coming Out, Chapter 8 / カミングアウト、第8章 (25 April 2009)

This dream always saw me home alone, rushing to close every door and window, and ended with my death. It had recurred all through school, until I’d come out and lived more openly outside Israel.

Yet this time, I wasn’t home anymore. Rather, in a museum or some kind of a public building I’d visited. Instead of locking everything, I fought back. Then I woke before my death.

27 May 2024

Through with Love

How could the brain go from thinking about someone 24/7 to not thinking about them at all?

How did intense appreciation twist into scorn?

A smile could build an empire; absence could reduce it to shambles. I finally felt like I was moving on. 

The healing power of writing never ceased to amaze me. Drafting this post had taken weeks, because every time I’d worked on it, I’d felt a little better. Then I’d relapsed; written another love poem; and felt better.

Sometimes there were moments when unrequited love flowed away from me, like water under the bridge. Sometimes I grieved it, knowing I’d never get to exchange another word, another kiss, another laugh. My strongest feelings of admiration toward another person had turned out to be the least reciprocated.

I missed their personality most of all. Evidently, I hadn’t fallen in love at first sight with a body, but with an individual’s character.

I would never forget those life-changing encounters, the kind I would’ve committed to until my death after one night together. But I also understood the other person, because I’d been liked just as fiercely, yet hadn’t liked in return.

Did I ache? Did I acquiesce? My pen exulted in my pain either way. Writers throve off misery, and now that it ceased to agitate me, I could focus on the ink that broken hearts bled.

This was the root of a tree whose paper was immortalized by eternal love stories. I suffered, therefore I lived; I lived, therefore I wrote.

It was impossible for me not to document all these developments and post them online. I needed proof of who I was at this point in time, because a month from now, I wouldn’t be the same.

Updated list of things I didn’t miss about Israel:

• People who try to sell me products or ask for religious donations by pestering me on the phone and refusing to take a “no thank you” for an answer
• Scammers
• Spam text messages
• Cockroaches. EVERY DAY
• Screaming myself hoarse and shaking with rage because everyone always has bad things to say and criticize me more than they show support
• Mizrahi music (and the way its fans are fond of blasting it in public)
• People and events are always late
• People talk and use their phones in cinemas, theatres, lectures, even when a holocaust survivor is giving a lecture
• People talk on speaker in public
• Haredi Jews read the bible instead of going to work, give birth to ten children, choose single-use plastics every day due to the size of their family and the Jewish prohibition of doing the dishes every Shabbat, and receive a shit ton of taxpayer stipends from the government to live like this because of religion
• Lag Ba’Omer, AKA a religious holiday where an entire nation lights bonfires and pollutes the Earth
• Hebrew speakers almost always use present tense to describe events in the past. THERE IS A PAST TENSE FOR THAT
• Everyone calls me “friend” – even strangers. WE’RE NOT FRIENDS
• Workplaces call employees “family” – even if they fire them the next day. WE’RE NOT FAMILY